Firstly, Happy New Year! I hope everyone’s Christmas was as filled with food, wine and family hysterics as mine (for some reason my siblings and I seem to have an insatiable habit of producing inexplicable giggle fits whenever we’re reunited).

Whilst there was some definite overindulgence happening over the festive period I’m pretty chuffed that I managed to squeeze in a few runs pre and post-Christmas, with the highlight being The Saltwood Boxing Day Run, a very muddy 3 mile cross country race, which is something of a tradition amongst my family. These runs (ok, gentle trots in some cases) definitely put me in good stead to start 2016 on the right foot, which leads me to the main point here…

I thought I’d make my first post of 2016 an exciting one and announce that I’ve decided to make 2016 the year that I finally run a MARATHON (the word is entirely deserved of it’s own paragraph, but I’ll stick with bold letters and capitals for now)! What with 2014 being the year of the half marathon and 2015 the year of the Sub-50 10K it was time for a new challenge. Spurred on by the journeys of some fellow bloggers, Running for August in particular, I scoured Runner’s World’s events list and decided on the Milton Keynes Marathon on May 2nd 2016.

Whilst my heart would love to take up a charity place in the London Marathon in April, my head tells me that what with some big goings on at work this year, and of course 4 months of intense training, this probably isn’t the wisest option.

Over the next 17 weeks I’ll be following Hal Higdon’s Intermediate 2 programme, which I’m entirely expecting to tweak and adapt depending on pre-planned social events, my fitness preferences outside of running and of course the inevitable tiredness. If you’d like to follow my journey I’ll be posting a weekly re-cap of my training, will be tracking the majority of my runs on my Strava and of course posting plenty of photos on Instagram.